


(i look beyond what people are saying and) i see intent

by jellyfishes



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Minor Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, also there are brackets, i took a lot of creative license and went with it oops, umm basically post the season 2 midseason finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 04:52:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2838695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jellyfishes/pseuds/jellyfishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time she finds him when he’s on a graveyard guard shift, he thinks he’s dreaming. She doesn’t look real in the moonlight and he blinks heavily as he looks up at her. “Hey, princess,” he says and he’s pretty sure she smiles.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>or</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Clarke hasn't spoken in the months following Finn's death and Bellamy keeps her company.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(i look beyond what people are saying and) i see intent

He wasn’t born to be an academic or anything special — he knows that. But Bellamy Blake is not a stupid guy. He knows what he needs to know to survive, and what matters. He knows that things take time.

(People)

People take time to heal.

He knows this, because two months after Finn’s death, he still hears Raven crying when he passes her room on the way back from a late shift guarding the camp that’s been set up around what’s left of the Arc. He sees the way that Murphy twitches every time a gun is fired near the camp, his head whipping around in horror and fear, arm up to protect his eyes as though he doesn’t want to see.

And Clarke. She still hasn’t said a word.

“Don’t ask me,” her mother says, her lips pursed in a thin line as she passes a bunch of bandages to someone who’s packing a day pack for a scouting trip in the forest. “You know just as well as I do that I’m the last person who’ll know when my daughter starts talking again.”

 

 

//

 

 

Life, though, goes on. Everything’s become sort of peaceful now that they’ve got their people back from Mount Weather — numbers significantly lower than those who started out there, but they’re together now and that’s what matters. He wasn’t part of the mission that got them back and it eats at him everyday, wondering if maybe him being there would have stopped Miller being killed in the crossfire, just moments before his father burst through the guard to see his son bleeding to death at his feet.

He knows that Clarke would have been the first to volunteer if Abby Griffin hadn’t kept the mission from her altogether. “It’s for her own good,” she’d said to Bellamy when he’d told her that Clarke would never forgive her for it. “She’s not thinking straight. Clarke will forgive me when we bring her friends home safely.”

(He doesn’t know when he started fighting a war with Abby over Clarke’s best interests.)

 

 

//

 

 

“Have you tried talking to her?” Octavia asks, leaning against his side where he’s stationed in one of the watch towers one late afternoon. There’s an orange glow cast over the camp as the sun dips below the mountains and it makes Bellamy want to close his eyes and bathe in the warmth of it.

“She doesn’t want to talk, O,” he says, readjusting his grip on the rifle in his hands and letting a sigh fall from his lips. “I don’t want to push her.”

Octavia shrugs, playing with one of the braids in her hair. “I don’t mean making her talk,” she says. “I mean, have you even spoken a word to her since it all went down?” He raises an eyebrow at her. “You know she sits with Raven in the workshop and listens to her yabber on about nothing all day. I think it helps both of them. Distracts them, y’know.”

He thinks about it… about sitting down with Clarke and talking to her until he’s run out of words. They’ve never worked like that before. She’s always pushed back at him and he’s used to that — to his fiery words being matched by her equally biting response. It’s the way that she grinds her insults at him out through her teeth that leaves a smirk on his lips at the end of each of their conversations. He doesn’t know how to talk to Clarke when she’s not interrupting him, talking back at him with an annoyed tone.

He’s scared he wouldn’t have anything to say.

“I don’t know,” he says, his voice unsure and Octavia rolls her eyes, heaving herself up and brushing her legs off.

“Keep telling yourself it’s not driving you crazy not having her around, Bell,” she says before she walks away.

And sure, he wants to murder Octavia for what she says, but mostly it’s because she’s right. He misses her.

 

 

//

 

 

He’s allowed out on a supply run for the first time since they set up camp with the adults and stepping outside of the gates makes him feel like the first time he stepped out of the dropship onto solid earth. He’s giddy with the fact that he’s about to be between the trees, his feet crushing wet leaves as the sounds of the forest envelop him. He looks to his left to raise a hand to beckon Octavia over with a wave and sees Clarke.

She’s jogging towards him from the room that’s been set up for the medical team. Abby’s been letting her help out more and more, but she still frowns whenever she asks Clarke a question and is met with silence. Bellamy has grown to resent the twitch of annoyance in her jaw… he wants her to be patient with her daughter — to give her the time she needs.

“Princess,” he says when she reaches him. And it brings a smile to his lips. Octavia was right. He feels better just being able to talk to her at all. “What’ve you got for me?”

She extends her hand, a piece of paper on there with drawings of leaves and flowers. He’s guessing that the stuff on there is useful medically and he nods, folding up the paper and putting it into the pocket on the inside of his jacket. It’s the only one in his jacket that has a zipper and he doesn’t want to lose it — wants to do this for her.

“Gotta make sure you get the flowers with red bleeding out from the centre towards yellow. Not the other way around.” Octavia appears by his side, smiling at Clarke. “Right doc?”

He guesses that his sister learnt that kind of thing from Lincoln and he watches as Clarke nods carefully, a small smile playing on her lips.

“Red in the middle, yellow on the outside. How hard can it be?” he smirks, patting his pocket again and smiling at both of them before they’re joined by the others on the scouting team, pulling him away and towards the woods.

Suddenly, he wants to stay.

 

 

//

 

 

The first time she finds him when he’s on a graveyard guard shift, he thinks he’s dreaming. She doesn’t look real in the moonlight and he blinks heavily as he looks up at her. “Hey, princess,” he says and he’s pretty sure she smiles.

Octavia told him that he should try talking to her — that speaking to her at all will be better than distancing himself from her like he has been. “You wanna sit?” he asks. “It’s all quiet here anyway… no action since the truce.” He trails off, biting his lip. He had to bring up the truce like a fucking idiot and he wouldn’t blame her if she turned around and walked away.

She sits.

“I had a nice time looking for all those plants for you the other day,” he says. And it’s awkward — he doesn’t know what to say. But saying something is better than saying nothing, isn’t it? “The jagged leaves are a bitch to harvest. All those fucking thorns. They better save some helpless person that would have died otherwise, I swear to God.”

He breaks off and looks over at her. She’s looking out over the forest and the moon is paling her skin. She looks so breakable and he feels the need to protect her — it’s something he’s familiar with. He’s always had a protective streak, but it’s never been for someone who wasn’t family before. Not for someone that he’s found unbearable to be around for so long. Then again, it had been pretty unbearable _not_ being around her for so many months before they were reunited.

They sit in silence for a bit, which is nice too. He’s become accustomed to silence in general, but silence from Clarke is a new thing. That being said, he’s getting used to new things.

“You should get some sleep,” he says eventually, and when she nods and stands up, he’s tempted to abandon his guard post and walk her all the way back to her room. He wants her to be safe (and he knows there’s nowhere safer than this camp, but he wants to be _sure_ ), but she’s walking away before he can even haul himself to his feet and he’s forced to watch her retreat without turning to look back at him once.

 

 

//

 

 

It happens a lot after that — Clarke finding him when he’s on guard at all kinds of hours of the night. Mostly he just talks about his day.

He picks up a lot of gossip from around the camp from the other guards and he figures that she hears it from Raven mostly, but she doesn’t seem to mind hearing it again from him. The stories that really make her perk up are the ones that he tells about being out in the forest… either hunting for food or collecting other supplies. Octavia calls their crew the hunters and gatherers and he rolls his eyes at her every time, it still makes him smile to see the way her eyes light up every time she stumbles on a new tree of berries that she can try.

He brings her flowers from the woods sometimes, when he can find a place to put it where he doesn’t have to worry about crushing it. She doesn’t say anything, but he thinks she appreciates it.

They’d look nice tucked behind her ear in her hair.

 

 

//

 

 

“There’s this lake half a day’s walk from here towards the east,” he says. “We can go there. Lincoln’s taught Octavia how to swim and she’s been dying to show me. Maybe you can learn too.”

 

 

//

 

 

Sometimes he’s angry. “Fucking twat Jones forgot about his shift so I was sat there working a double until someone worked out what was going on. I swear to God, this camp is so unorganised. They should let me run it. No one would forget about the jobs they have to do if I was in charge.”

When he’s like that, she can usually calm him down with a soft laugh and a hand on his knee.

It’s infuriating.

 

 

//

 

 

“God, princess you have no idea how much you’d love the view from the west mountain.”

 

 

//

 

 

He mostly eats by himself in the mess hall. Sometimes Murphy joins him (and he honestly doesn’t know how he reached a point where he’s okay with that), or Jasper and Monty. He doesn’t mind the company, but people have made a habit of keeping away from him.

“Hey man,” Jasper says, sliding into the seat opposite Bellamy and shuffling along the bench so that Monty can clamber in after him. “How’s things?”

Bellamy shrugs, sawing at a bit of boar that’s cooked just a little too much. “Can’t complain,” he says, raising an eyebrow and lifting his fork to his mouth. “Yourselves?”

It’s small talk, and he’s never been a fan of it. But he knows that Jasper and Monty mean well — they’re just trying to make peace. And the poor guys have been through a lot at Mount Weather, from what he’s heard. He’s not been game enough to ask anyone about it who was there. All he knows is from Octavia, and he’s sure that she’s been scared to probe too.

He hears Raven cry at night, but he hears Jasper scream.

Monty and Jasper are off on one of their ranting stories, where they interrupt each other when they miss out details, jumping all over the place to fill in the gaps. It’s a mess, but it makes Bellamy smile — distracts him from flicking his gaze over to the table where Clarke is sitting with her mother and Raven, eyes leaving her plate every now and then to follow the conversation going on around her.

“So,” Monty says, his voice awkward. “How’s Clarke?”

Bellamy smiles, looks over to her. A month ago, she was eating dinner in her room, alone. “She’s good,” he says — and he means it. He thinks she’s doing better. The more time he spends around her, the more he sees that she’s okay.

“She talked yet?” Jasper asks, shoving a piece of meat into his mouth and Bellamy feels a flare of anger shoot through him like an arrow.

“I don’t know why everyone acts like the be all and end all of Clarke being okay is whether or not she’s spitting insults at us every two seconds,” he says. “She’s alive isn’t she? She’s safe and she’s here with us. Does it _matter_ if she’s talking?”

The truth is, he’s stopped caring whether Clarke can find it in herself to talk. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to understand what she was feeling when she drove the knife into Finn’s chest that night. He gets that she can’t put it into words and that if she can’t talk about the one thing that is presumably filling her thoughts at every given moment, why talk about anything at all? The more time he spends with her, the more he realises that she’s more than the things she says.

Jasper looks at him, shrugs a bit and digs back into his food. “I dunno, man. Seems crazy that she hasn’t spoken in what, three months now? More?” And God, Jasper’s always bee a bit of an inconsiderate ass hasn’t he?

“Why does it matter?” he asks, his voice sharper than it was before and Jasper stops mid bite to look up at him in surprise. “She’s still _Clarke_. Her heart is still beating. That’s more than we can say for a lot of people who came down here on the drop ship with us.” Jasper flinches, but Bellamy can’t find it in himself to care. “As long as she’s alive and she’s happy, I honestly couldn’t care less if she’s silent until she’s old and grey.”

“Okay, man, just checking.” Monty pats Jasper’s shoulder consolingly and Bellamy rolls his eyes, scraping his chair back from the table and storming out of the mess hall towards a bunch of kids from the hundred who are mucking around instead of working.

He thinks ordering people around will make him feel better.

(It does. But it’s only temporary.)

 

 

//

 

 

“I met a grounder today.”

Her eyes flash with worry and Bellamy brushes his hand across her knee to calm her down. It works almost instantly and he smirks. Clarke has been reactionary for as long as he’s known her — it’s one of his favourite things about her. The one thing she doesn’t hold back with is her emotions.

“No, it was amazing,” he continues, turning to look at her. She’s watching him with large eyes, attentive and listening. “I was out in the woods looking for more wild onions and she was just… there. Her name’s Mata.”

He thinks back to the way she was crouched low over a bush of black berries, her eyes darting back and forth across his face as he approached her, hands spread out in a show of peace.

“You know, I’ve never had any real exposure to the grounders since we made the truce,” he says, watching carefully as her jaw tightens when he mentions it. “But it’s amazing — walking up to one and having a conversation with her without worrying that I’m going to get an arrow in my back for it. It’s — we needed the truce, Clarke. You made it happen.”

Clarke looks down at her hands and he’s startled with a temptation to lock his fingers around hers, to tell her that it’s okay to be proud of something as well as being ashamed of it… that she did what she had to do and that no one begrudges her for it (even Raven knows that she didn’t have another choice, really).

But she doesn’t need to hear that for what he’s sure would be the thousandth time. She needs him to talk — at least, that’s what he’s picked up from her. She keeps coming back, so he must be doing something right.

“She’s a healer,” he continues. “Only reason she can speak English is because her mother was a warrior and taught her before she died.” Clarke flinches. “She died a few years before we got to earth,” he explains. “Reapers attacked their camp.” He watches as her shoulders relax.

He can’t help but grin and the memory of the girl — so stubborn and unwilling to answer Bellamy’s questions at first… completely focussed on collecting the berries, she’d had no time to make a friend. “Her father wanted her to become a healer, you know, to carry on her mother’s legacy. But she seemed pretty strong willed to me. She wanted to be a healer, so she went out and did it.” He chuckles. “Reminds me of you a bit — always doing the opposite of what everyone tells you to.”  
Clarke glares at him, her eyes flashing with mock anger and he grins.

“Didn’t say it was a bad thing, princess.”

In fact, he thinks it’s probably the opposite.

 

 

//

 

 

“Bitch gave me these berries today that were so bitter I had to spit them out. Should have spat them in her face, honestly. The look on her face — she thought it was the funniest thing in the world.”

 

 

//

 

 

There’s an amused smile dancing across her face as he recounts the story of Murphy getting caught up in an old, forgotten grounder trap. They’d gotten him down from it quickly enough, but it had been amusing for a moment — the look on his face.

She looks beautiful like this, the greyish pink light of the sunrise casting shadows across her face as she breathes a laugh from her lips. “You know it’s weird not having you yelling at me for letting him suffer for even a moment,” he says with a smirk.

She punches him — only in the arm, but it’s _hard_ and he lets out a startled laugh.

“There’s the evil princess we know and love,” he says, still laughing when it hits him.

He loves her.

_God_ , he loves her so much it sits heavy in his chest, clawing at his ribs like it’s trying to burst out and —

She’s right there, looking at him with an amused smile on her face and he truly wants to give her the whole planet and more. The colour of her eyes makes him want to change the world and he doesn’t know how he didn’t see any of this before — how he could have been so blind to it, to all of it.

He doesn’t say another word until the end of his shift and if Clarke is looking at him like he’s gone mad the whole time, he doesn’t care.

 

 

//

 

 

“I’m sorry,” he says as soon as he sees her.

They’re not in their usual spot at his guard post — he’s made the effort to come all the way to her room across the other side of camp… doesn’t like how he left things yesterday.

She raises an eyebrow at him, but he’s sure that she knows what he’s apologising for.

He crosses the room in three strides until he’s right in front of her — the dim light of the lantern casting a flicker on her skin. “I’m sorry,” he says again, reaching out to tuck a piece of her hair behind her ear. She doesn’t lean into the touch, but she doesn’t move away from him either. Just looks up at him with questions written all over her face.

He wishes that he had answers for her.

“I’d like more than anything to kiss you right now,” he says softly, speaking the words into the shared space between them and she breathes out steadily. He thinks he sees her nod, a tiny imperceptible tilt of the head, but he needs to be sure.

“Clarke,” he says again, sliding a hand through her hair to cup the back of her neck gently. “This is okay?”

Her nod is clearer this time and he leans in, stopping an inch from her lips in case she wants an out. But she stays exactly where she is until their lips meet.

Kissing Clarke is like arguing with her.

She nips at his bottom lip as their mouths slant together and he growls low in his throat. He should have known that she’d be unrelenting in the way she fought to control the kiss — her hands carding through his hair to try and angle his head how she wanted it, a whine low in her throat.

“Easy princess,” he murmurs against her lips when she pushes him back far enough that his back hits the desk next to her bed and he’s not surprised that his voice shakes when he speaks.

She rolls her eyes and reaches for him again and he feels himself come alive over and over again as she traces the bite she left on his lips with her tongue. He moves his hands to the small of her back, pulling her closer so that he can feel her pressed against him as tightly as possible.

“Can you keep a secret?” he asks, his hands on her shoulder to hold her back for a moment. They’re interrupted by a knock on the door and Clarke jumps back, looking at him with wild eyes that are bright with excitement.

“You’re coming out with us tomorrow,” Bellamy says, winking at her and relishing in the flush that colours her cheeks when she smiles in surprise as he passes her on the way to the door.

“Bellamy,” Abby Griffin says with surprise — smiles at him, though it seems fake. “Is everything alright?”

“Of course,” he says. “Just stopping by to see if Clarke needed any supplies. We’re making up the list for the scout tomorrow.”

She nods at him and smiles again, warmer this time, before disappearing into Clarke’s room.

(He realises that when it comes to Clarke, they’re probably on the same side most of the time.)

 

 

//

 

 

He hears her before he sees her — the telltale crunch of her boots on the earth behind him and he’s already greeting her as she slides into place next to him, folding her legs underneath her. He hasn’t seen Clarke properly since he took her out into the forest two days ago, but the memory of her standing, eyes closed in the middle of a clearing as she breathed in the fresh air was enough to keep him going.

“Hey, princess,” he says easily, shuffling over a bit so that she can fit in next to him a little better.

She doesn’t look at him, but a tiny smile graces her lips before they part. “Hey.”

There’s a moment where he wants to make something of it — to wake everyone up and scream it from the top of the tallest tree on earth. That he loves her and he’s proud of her. But he knows Clarke… knows that she wouldn’t want anything made of it. So he huffs out a laugh and turns his gaze back to surveying the forest for any movement.

“I saw a flower today that looked like a galaxy,” he says (feels her fingers grip his tightly).

It’s a start.

**Author's Note:**

> hello come and say hi on [tumblr](http://jellyfishes.tumblr.com)


End file.
